Pennsylvania House Republicans Introduce Bill To Rig The 2016 Presidential Election

[Blue Nile]

35. Tough task

Sorry for cross-posting across threads but I had to express my feelings again

This is in my home state of Pennsylvania so it does affect me directly.Although anything is possible,I have a feeling that the window for this kind of change has probably closed in my state of PA.Prior to the last election the GOP controlled the State Senate 30-20.In the November 2012 election,the democrats picked up Senate seats in Erie,Harrisburg and Pittsburgh and the Senate is now 27-23 in favor of the GOP.In the State House of Representatives there was again a gain by the Democrats but not as large as the Senate (went from 112-91 to 110-93 in favor of GOP). This kind of tight margins make it hard for the change in law to happen easily. It will only serve to increase Democratic turnout in a non-presidential year putting a lot of GOP held seats in play. The margin in PA in the Presidential election was 5 points (52-47) and a GOP candidate with moderate appeal can still hope to win the state. President Bush got 48.5 % of the vote in 2004 and with more effort could have carried the state. Not all Democratic candidates of the future are going to be able to match President Obama's appeal.

This Bill is co-sponsored by Rep.Godshall and Rep.Seth Grove (he had introduced a similar Bill in 2009 also). The Bill is now in the State Government Committee where only one of the co-sponsors is a member (Rep.Barrar). Assuming that all the Democrats in the House unite against this-it will need 102 out of 110 House republicans to vote for this and will be a tough number to muster. The task in the Senate is much more difficult for the Republicans as the margins are very tight. The Republicans will need 26 out of 27 Senators to vote for this (By PA law-the Bill should have a clear majority for final passage and the Lt.Gov cannot cast a tie-breaking vote for final passage of a Bill). The last similar Bill introduced by Sen.Pilleggi (R-Chester) failed to make it out of committee. He has floated an alternate idea of proportional distribution but has not given any details about this and has only said he plans to introduce a Bill later.

Gov.Corbett is struggling at this time with ratings in the high 30s and although he has hedged his views on this before I am not so sure he is going to put his re-election at risk.In 2010 he won with 54% of the vote where the turnout was a hair under 4 million votes compared to almost 5.7 million votes in the 2012 presidential election. It is not in his interest to drive up Democratic voter turnout on this issue.He is trailing in polls against most Democrats polled including Kane,Sestak etc.

I did not mean this post to imply that we should drop our guard and become complacent but only to highlight that though it is possible it is far from a smooth-sailing slam-dunk. My feeling on these type of Bills in all these states is that there is 1 or 2 driven legislators who keep introducing these Bills in every session but generally fail to attract sufficient traction amongst the larger caucus.
It is not in the interests of a majority of these republican legislators to attract more attention to their districts and make re-election difficult.Also the beneficiary of this rule change is some yet unknown Presidential candidate who might still go on to lose the General election